Tessa Jowell: We must put the Olympic legacy back on track

Funding cuts mean the original programme has been allowed to drift — it’s time for the Prime Minister to act

Lasting impact: the Velodrome and Olympic Village. The basketball arena is being recycled

26 July 2013

A week before the Olympics I became a deputy mayor of the Olympic Village and moved into my flat in Team GB’s block with my fellow deputy mayors, Tony Hall and Duncan Goodhew. For me it was the best culmination of 10 years work on the Olympics and Paralympics that I could imagine. I felt very lucky indeed.

This weekend we will celebrate the extraordinary memories so many of us hold from last summer but we would squander a great possibility if we allowed nostalgia alone to be the defining mark one year on — now is the moment to define the next stage in the legacy of the Games. Here we should remember the lesson from Barcelona, where regeneration of the city was the post-Olympic ambition and is not complete 21 years later.

Legacy was imprinted on our Olympic and Paralympics bid from the start. The Legacy Corporation was set up five years before the Games to oversee the first ambition — the regeneration of east London. Out of every £1 of funding, 75p was spent on decontaminating and building the Olympic Park.

Progress in delivering what we promised is good: the long-term future of all the venues is secure and they await their users from the local boroughs and the world of elite sport. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is proof that the first legacy promise is on its way.

Looking forward, five new neighbourhoods are being created, comprising nearly 8,000 new homes by 2030 — 35 per cent of which will be affordable. In September the first residents will move into the former Olympic Village, now called East Village.

The second legacy promise, to inspire a generation of young people through sport, was gravely set back by Michael Gove’s decision to end the dedicated funding to the School Sports Partnership Programme. In government we spent more than eight years building sport into every child’s school days, giving them the chance to take part in sport so that by 2010 more than 90 per cent of young people were taking part in more than two hours of sport a week.

It remains to be seen how far the achievements of that programme can be rebuilt within the Government’s current funding, but as shadow sports minister Clive Efford and the Smith Institute have recently shown, children are playing less sport in school.

The conventional wisdom suggests that 2005 was the moment to take the big decisions but I believe now is the time to be bold. So here is a legacy challenge for the next 10 years.

First, the Prime Minister’s Legacy Committee should embrace cross-party membership, just as the original Olympics and Paralympics bodies did. Long-term decisions should be taken with as little party-political wrangling as possible. Bringing the Opposition into the legacy strategy will help embed it for the future.

Second, the PM should appoint a Secretary of State for Sport to guide the programme through. Only through a senior appointment at this level will the combined resources of the Departments of Health, Education, Culture, Media and Sport and the Home Office be properly harnessed to maximise the sporting value and impact.

Third, we must agree a 10-year school sport agreement, negotiated cross-party, to ensure stability and certainty. There’s no ideology in ensuring young people have access to regular and varied exercise during their childhood. Evidence suggests that dedicated money spent over the long term means children who play sport are more likely to achieve in their academic studies and enjoy going to school. With the opportunities created by excellent coaching, some will go on to become national or world champions.

Perhaps more than anything the Olympics and Paralympics were defined by what we all hoped was the spirit of Britain, captured in 70,000 Games Makers and countless other volunteers. That is too precious to be allowed to fade with the passage of time. So across the country people should be given the chance to volunteer without them feeling bossed around. The evidence is that they will do it in droves. What we often forget is, as one Games Maker said to me: “People are prepared to give much more than they are asked to, as long as it is not the Government telling them to do it.”

Fourth, we should look to negotiate a new concordat with companies to ensure that staff are allowed adequate time off to volunteer within their community — your right to volunteer should not be dependent on the social responsibility policy of whoever you work for.

Fifth, we must embrace partnerships between government and the private sector. For example, using the leverage of Olympic contracts to spur new innovation such as London’s new digital quarter; guaranteeing a more diverse workforce; ensuring we staged the greenest Games ever and involving the local community in decisions about the development of the park.

Eighty-two per cent of the Olympic Park workforce were paid the London Living Wage or more and 457 apprentices worked on the Olympic project. Partnership with the trade unions created a historic health-and- safety record, ensuring that despite being the largest project of its size in Europe at the time, no one died in constructing the park. This shows how good social purpose can underpin commercial success, and future government contracts with the private sector should reflect this.

The final challenge is to honour the pre-Olympics promise and publish the programme for repayment of the £678 million that was diverted from Lottery good causes.

These are all big and testing challenges, and the machinery of government, with the Prime Minister’s leadership, must be dedicated to the challenge.

Last year we thrilled to the poetry of the Olympic and Paralympic summer. This year the next chapter is to be written and great change could follow. But to reap the rewards we deserve we must realise that the time for ambition and clarity of thought was not just in 2005 at the bidding stage, it is now — a time to be bold.

Tessa Jowell: We must put the Olympic legacy back on track

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